A massive and immoral scheme

My husband got his Social Security eligibility notice in the mail. We were interested to learn that he may choose to start collecting this year at age 62 and lock in for a lesser amount, or elect to postpone benefits till age 66 for a larger amount. In other words, we must now bet on his life expectancy.

No one thought through that bet when it came to Ida May Fuller. The Vermont woman was the first person in history to receive Social Security checks. Having worked for three months under FDR’s new program, contributing a total of $24.75, she retired at age 65 and proceeded to live 35 additional years. By the time Ida died at 100, for the price of a 1940 Kodak Vest Pocket camera she had collected the princely sum of $22,888.92.

It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon (as my son likes to say) to see a problem with this arrangement.

The FICA withholding from your paycheck is only voluntary in the sense that you can quit your job if you don’t like it, and be unemployed.

I referred to Ida May’s contribution to the program, but it really is a tax. The difference between a “contribution” and a “tax” is volition. The FICA withholding from your paycheck is only voluntary in the sense that you can quit your job if you don’t like it, and be unemployed. The government favors words like “contribution” and “benefits” because that makes Social Security feel like insurance. It feels like Uncle Sam is helping you squirrel away your payments into a nice lockbox where it will be waiting for you when the time comes. But Social Security is no more insurance than the Holy Roman Empire was holy.

Remember The Matrix: “There is no spoon”? Well, there is no lockbox. There is a vault full of IOUs.

Picture a kid named Billy who asks his friend Wally to hold onto $10 for him till he gets back from a family vacation at Grandma’s. Wally puts it aside and fully intends not to touch it, but then a great opportunity comes up for a pack of baseball cards from Joey with a Roger Maris in it. And as Billy won’t be back from Grandma’s till July, it seems like a reasonable idea to use Billy’s money to pay Joey, and then replace it with his own projected allowance money before Billy returns. This way Joey gets his money and Wally gets the baseball card and Billy gets his dough, and no one is the wiser.

But what if for some reason Wally doesn’t get his allowance this month? Maybe he didn’t take out the trash one night, or he flunked geography. For whatever reason, he has bet on the future with somebody else’s money, and the future hasn’t panned out as he planned.

The case with Social Security is like that but worse. There is not even the pretense that there is a projected allowance coming to save the day. The feds have been taking from Peter to pay Paul for years, helping themselves with our money to fund other government programs and expenditures, in an elaborate shell game. The proceeds being extracted from my and your 20- and 30-something-year-old children are going directly to current Social Security beneficiaries. Our children are being lied to, in a scheme of massive and immoral generational transfer of funds.

“We’ve become an immoral people demanding that Congress forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another” (Walter Williams, George Mason University, cited in Mark Levin’s Plunder and Deceit).

If we don’t want our children throwing darts at our pictures when we’re long gone—or if we just want to do what’s right, whether we get credit or not for it (2 Corinthians 13:7b)—we must figure out how to start undoing the largest single component of the financial burden we have saddled them with: Social Security. I am starting by ruling out presidential candidates who don’t have a plan, other than, “I’ll find a way. Believe me. I’ll be great at this. Believe me.” I am also ruling out candidates who belong to the club that caused the problem.

And if all else fails, I have told my youngest daughter I would put aside some of my SS benefits in a lockbox for her—and I won’t let Joey lay a finger on it.

Email aseupeterson@wng.org